MANKATO, Minn. — Leslie Frazier has interviewed for seven head-coaching vacancies and felt good about six of those interviews.

"One of them I was a little concerned about," he said.

The Vikings assistant head coach and defensive coordinator declined to identify the source of his unease, but it doesn't take a slippery slope to land in Seattle, which interviewed Frazier early in January, only a couple of days before naming Pete Carroll its coach.

Frazier is one of the NFL's top coordinators, leaving a trail of success everywhere he has been — from Philadelphia to Indianapolis to Minnesota. The Vikings have been the league's top run defense since his arrival in 2007 and No. 6 overall the past two seasons.

That's why he has been a head-coaching candidate seven times, and, he said, "been grateful for every opportunity."

But there was a sense among many NFL watchers that his interview with Seattle was feint by the Seahawks to comply with the Rooney Rule, which requires the league's 32 teams to interview at least one minority candidate for any head-coaching or front-office position.

Frazier interviewed for two head-coaching jobs the first week of January, the other with the Buffalo Bills. After the Seahawks hired Carroll, a modestly successful coach at New England before turning around Southern Cal's program, Frazier deflected questions about whether he might have been used.

Advertisement

With the Vikings' NFC divisional playoff game against Dallas approaching, Frazier told reporters: "I don't know if now is necessarily the most appropriate time. But there will be a time."

Asked about it Monday, Frazier was more open.

"With those interviews that I was in back in January, I went into them with the best intentions, based on advice I got from key people, and just tried to approach it the right way," he said. "Now, I can't answer for ownership, you know, what they were looking for and what they wanted out of the interviews. But I went into it believing each one would be a legitimate interview."

And did he come out feeling they were legitimate interviews?

"Um, I don't want to say which team, but one of them I was a little concerned about, and we went right down to the wire about whether I should even do the interview," he said. "On one of them, I left just wondering."

Frazier was a special assistant and defensive backs coach for Tony Dungy in Indianapolis when the Colts won the 2007 Super Bowl, and since 2008, he has interviewed for head-coaching positions in Seattle, Buffalo, Detroit, St. Louis and Miami. And he is a strong proponent of the Rooney Rule, established in 2003 to make sure minority candidates get a fair opportunity.

"The Rooney Rule serves its purpose. It still needs to be in place," he said. "There are so many great minority candidates out there, and hopefully teams will give them the opportunity to interview, and hopefully someone will be hired through that process.

"It hasn't happened of late. It seems like guys have been hired from within as ownership has gotten comfortable with them. Maybe soon somebody will be hired through an interview."

At the time of the Rooney Rule's inception, there were four African-American head coaches. Now there are six: Cincinnati's Marvin Lewis, the Colts' Jim Caldwell, Tampa Bay's Raheem Morris, San Francisco's Mike Singletary, Chicago's Lovie Smith and Pittsburgh's Mike Tomlin.

Three of those coaches — Caldwell, Smith and Tomlin — have led teams to the Super Bowl. Tomlin, a former Vikings defensive coordinator, followed Dungy as the second African-American coach to win an NFL title.

The NFL did not find fault with Seattle's hiring practices in January, and on Monday reiterated that opinion.

"Clubs with openings last season complied with the Rooney Rule," spokesman Brian McCarthy said. The league declined to comment further.

Frazier, 51, believes that one day he will be an NFL head coach, but if he isn't, "I'm not going to cry in my soup." The next time he gets an interview request, though, he'll approach it more cautiously. After last winter, he said, "I just told myself I've got to be a little wiser in the future.